the federal union to be illegal, to be treasonous, and by badly weakening the u.s., utterly unseasonable. and on that question, preservation of the union, the need to defend the state's of the united states from an armed attempt to destroy it as a nation, the vast majority of those people who lived in the free states, republicans and nonrepublicans alike, agreed wholeheartedly with lincoln and his party. he and his government, thereby, and therefore, raised an army to resume their property places in the union. the next question then was, exactly how to fight that war. the republican government, we need remember, embarked upon the war not intending to lose the -- use the war itself to transform the south. the purpose of the union war northwest the eyes of its republican government, was simply to keep the slave states within the union, and a union in which the republicans could then proceed with their plan to slowly, gradually, peacefully, and with compensation, eventually do away with slavery. methods that, by the way, had that been the way slavery came to an end, they would have allowed
